A very long time ago, I was invited to give a talk to architecture students in a design charrette about how I approach program design (which in my world usually shows up as grantwriting) Here are the guiding principles I shared then, which have held true over time, and show up in all of our leadership and capacity-building work with clients:
Asset-based Perspective. Always start with the organizational and community assets and build from there. When developing new, fundable projects, stay focused on opportunity and what is working, as opposed to what’s messed up.
Less-visible Leadership. When designing projects with executive directors and lead staff, we take the role of collaborating partner rather than out-front leader. The label “less-visible leader” was coined by fundraising and organizational development trainer Andy Robinson in this publication.
Sustainability Lens. Cooking up project ideas without acknowledging the economic, cultural, and environmental context leaves potential partners and allies aside — and making that mistake can translate into mistrust and missing resources.
Aggressively Inclusive. We don’t get it right all the time but work to bake diversity, equity, inclusion, and connection into grant proposals and projects that we develop.
Skills Transfer. Our commitment is to sharing and offering what we know and have come to learn. The goal is not to keep clients dependent on our direct involvement, but to help move everyone to a place of strength and greater impact.
Critical Friend and Collaborative Partner. I have been inspired by Liz Lerman and John Borstel’s model for critique of creative work. We also draw from theory and best practices in collaboration, collective impact, systems, and teams.
Optimistic Practicality. Balancing vision with practice is a real tension in social change, social service, social enterprise, and philanthropy. The challenge among a lot of our clients (and ourselves) has been a struggle to put together puzzle pieces of funding and partners, with a glue mixture of narrative, strategy, delivery, trust, spit, sweat, and duct tape.
Since the talk, I’ve added another:
Resource and Revenue Creativity. Creating program ideas without sensible resource plans that show where the money could come from and where more money can be generated in the future? Not good and all too common.
Thinking, planning, and practical action, with an underlying drive toward what is possible, some loving (I swear) but challenging (ok and sometimes pushy) feedback, mad creative skills, and an unrelenting focus on building the resource base — over the years (and em-dash, mine) that’s some of what we bring to program design and grantwriting.